Player Character Balance

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Teh_Troll

Nonsense. Dance of flowers blows away any possible advantage a pure ranger could get.

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A pure ranger can get dance of flowers as well so your just flat out wrong here Troll.

Arcane Bolt and Arcane Blast...

Please, please, please, for the love of little kobold babies, either change their save off of Reflex, or let us Heighten them. I'm actually begging you. They already use non-loaded dice, and can't be empowered or maximized. And I'm okay with that. But please let us heighten them, or change their spell level! (And please make Arcane Blast spell level 5 while we're at it! Feels bad having a top tier enhancement be rendered useless by Mantle.)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Teh_Troll

The non-elite players are pretty non-elite playing Shiradi also.

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From my experience, a red butted monkey could play a shiradi sorc. Mine was running around half naked and still did better than other builds in end game.

Now it was nowhere Dr Peppers, but I have the impression that there is a huge discontinuity in the power progression of sorcs. Either you are being constantly evaded and you burn through mana or you are Dr Peppers. I don ´t think that is balanced, I feel that shiradi was to sorcs more of an accident. So I feel it would be better to increase the power of their natural destiny so that even just moderately grinded builds can be OK. Not great, but at least OK.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by maddmatt70

A pure ranger can get dance of flowers as well so your just flat out wrong here Troll.

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You really need to sign up for my course . . .

of course they can take it . . . but they can't be centered with the bow and be in fury. So while you're right on a technicality this idea is so insanely stupid that the best thing you could do now for DDO is set your PC on fire.

We’ve read the forum posts and tallied the surveys, and want to echo back what we’ve heard from you guys along with some of our thoughts on some specific points. There’s definitely even more feedback we’ve got notes on than just the stuff we’re listing here, but this highlights the most common and passionate feedback.

A compilation of some main points we’ve gathered from your feedback
The presumption is that most comments are about Epic Elite, as explicitly mentioned by many players.

For most characters, it’s hard to stay alive unless you avoid damage entirely.
• Melee monsters hit very hard. This pushes towards playing ranged characters to avoid monster melee damage.
• The most dangerous ranged enemies tend to be casters using spells that can be avoided with Reflex saving throws, which makes Evasion the best way to mitigate ranged damage.
What’s going on with monsters?
• Damage per hit from melee monsters is very high, even if you are building to mitigate it.
o It may be OK to hit this hard against robe-wearing arcane casters, but characters should be able to greatly reduce this damage with medium or heavy armor, appropriate feats, enhancements, destiny choices, and other itemization.
• Some other statistics may need looking at for Monsters, including hit points, saving throws, and the DCs of monster abilities.

On Balance Changes
There’s a wide variety of general opinions, including everything from “buff everything”, “nerf everything”, to “balance nothing”, “have a vision at Turbine and do the right thing!”, each of these repeated by multiple people. The best course probably involves some elements of all of these comments, both buffing and nerfing, possibly including nerfing monsters.
Many players have urged caution with any changes, specifically to minimize collateral damage. As an example, if changes are made to nerf monkcher Furyshotters, don’t break monks, rangers, other Fury of the Wild characters, and all ranged characters at the same time. Favor the scalpel over the sledgehammer.

Some quotes:
• “Characters should have to make tradeoffs. At the moment this isn't happening; some classes are able to have top notch dps and defense.”
• “DDO's greatest differentiating strength is the depth and robustness of character creation and development. The current situation effectively renders that moot, leaving DDO without a competitive advantage.”
• “This is a fantasy game, I log on to feel awesome.”
• “I'd like to see balance change once, to something good enough that most players are satisfied with it, and then stay that way for the duration. That would be perfect. But, you know... many small corrections as the need arises might be good enough.”
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...yVsBalance.png


On Diversity
A few seemed concerned that balance meant making everything the same. That’s not the goal, and the diversity of different build options represents one of the greatest strengths of DDO. The major reason we would want to balance anything would be to make more builds feel viable and fun to play, even in the most difficult quests.
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...nalVsPower.png

On Synergy
Many players noted that “overpowered” builds combine amazing synergies that may or may not have been intended. There are occasional combinations that produce unanticipated results, but generally speaking we aim to provide some synergies in character building. It’s OK for certain combos to be more than the sum of their parts, as long as there are lots of different synergies that don’t end up too far apart from each other in terms of fun and viability.

Survival & Defense
We’re thinking about the possibility of making some changes to how armor and shields work, with the goal of making medium and heavy armor more viable forms of defense in epic content. These discussions are at the most preliminary stages, but we’re aware there are issues here.

Multiclassing (ignoring Enhancements)
This could be another entire discussion. But many players thought it was crazy that multiclassing wasn’t the forefront of the discussion, so let’s talk about it.

We like being D&D. We are unlikely to significantly alter or remove core feats or abilities from classes or races.

Evasion is probably the biggest single draw for taking 2 Rogue or Monk levels. However, we may think about how common Reflex saving throws are vs. other saving throws, and other no-save effects that feel fair for monsters and players both. This would be a long-reaching goal, and would need to be made in concert with other changes, such as making sure that players aren’t simply dying, if Evasion was the only thing keeping most characters alive.

Multiclassing and Enhancement Trees
The enhancement pass in Update 19 certainly affected multiclassing. As a matter of learning from history, here’s some reasons why, which we were mostly aware of at the time:
• Frontloading and Minimizing changes to characters: Many popular & powerful abilities are “front-loaded”; they are on low tiers in the enhancement trees. This was very consciously done so that most characters could still get most of what they desired without much hassle. We knew this would incentivize multiclassing, but decided that was an acceptable cost. Even with this, during the enhancement pass there was a great deal of outcry. This is something we could make incremental changes to affect, but each change would probably make some subset of players upset, and we’re in no hurry to revamp everything and move everything around. (Giant tangential discussion for another time or place: “Class” enhancement trees aren’t a simple solution to this.)
• Number of enhancement trees: A major part of the original design (intended to present choice as well as help balance multiclass builds vs. pure builds) was the limit of 3 enhancement trees. Yes, you could still make a Henshin Mystic + Thief Acrobat, but you’d have to make meaningful choices and give things up to get them. Multiclassing is still clearly an increase in power (you get the “best” 3 trees out of 6-9, instead of just 3), but not as much as it is with 6 class trees. Essentially, we changed this due to feedback at the time, knowing it would help lead to the rise of multiclass characters. This is one of those places where we had a vision but it simply wasn’t accepted by the community at-large (which is not to place the blame on anyone.) We try to strike a balance between design considerations and the desires of the people who play our game, so we changed this to 6 class trees.
• Class Level Requirements: The U18 Enhancements largely required 6/12/18 class levels to get “the good stuff”. Both internally amongst the design team and publicly amongst the players, during the Enhancement pass a great variety of class level restrictions were proposed for the 5-tier trees we have now. These included some very strong calls for 1/3/6/12/28 (similar to the old system), all the way down to not requiring any class levels at all (essentially just requiring access to the tree). I’ll take personal responsibility for fighting for the 1/2/3/4/5 system we have today, which was for the goal of meaningful choices along with interesting possible builds. Instead of nearly every build being 20 or 18/2 or maybe 12/6/2, there’s a much wider variety of builds that players consider and actually take. Along with the third Core enhancement requiring level 6, there’s at least some real reasons to want anywhere from 1-6 class levels at least. And there are definitely some builds that splash 2/3/4 levels for specific enhancements and synergies. While these synergies do provide extra power, they also provide a much wider array of possible choices while still being choices (compared to only requiring 1 level of a class to access the entire tree). There’s still some debate that perhaps 1/2/3/4/5 is too generous, but this isn’t something we’d change lightly.

Frequency and Speed of Changes
In the forums, many players agreed that if something was going to be changed, it should be changed right away. However, there were some interesting notes, such as: “sometimes it takes a long long time before the synergy of certain things gets ‘popular’ and then is perceived as ‘overpowered’. Many months sometimes. Just because people discover a synergy straight away doesn't mean it should automatically be nerfed.” Also, the survey responses suggested that we should try to avoid any kind of immediate kneejerk reactions.

https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/files/HowSoon.png

As a contemporary note: When something is nerfed for Divine Crusader on Lamannia, or between Lamannia and live launch of the patch, this is sometimes an example of this in action. With our efforts to try to get features in front of players on Lamannia sooner, you are likely to see more changes, including ‘nerfs’. (It’s difficult for designers to even think of changes as nerfs, for a feature that has never been live. Internally here at Turbine, a design may change many times before players even seen it, the power level going up and down all the time.)

What’s specific items do players consider overpowered?
Major caveat: Anything considered overpowered by some is also loved by others. We’re aware of this. Anything on this list is also NOT automatically going to be nerfed or changed in any particular way, but these are things we may take a closer look at. There’s quite a few other possibilities we might look at, but these were near the top of the list for discussions.
• Ranged Fury of the Wild
• Monks using 10K Stars and manyshot (monkchers)
• Bladeforged Reconstruct

Survey
We always appreciate the passionate and detailed feedback you guys provide us, both as forum posts and as survey results. We’re still trying to improve how we construct surveys in the future, including adding N/A options. It was not our intent to only include information from players who were extremely knowledgeable with all classes and epic destines; we could have pointed out that it was fine to leave some answers blank (which many people did).

Here’s an overview of some of the survey results. Reminder that higher values indicate more power.
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...erAverages.png
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...erAverages.png
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...erAverages.png


Thanks for the great feedback! We’ll be reading along and looking for your ideas and opinions.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vargouille

We’ve read the forum posts and tallied the surveys, and want to echo back what we’ve heard from you guys along with some of our thoughts on some specific points. There’s definitely even more feedback we’ve got notes on than just the stuff we’re listing here, but this highlights the most common and passionate feedback.

A compilation of some main points we’ve gathered from your feedback
The presumption is that most comments are about Epic Elite, as explicitly mentioned by many players.

For most characters, it’s hard to stay alive unless you avoid damage entirely.
• Melee monsters hit very hard. This pushes towards playing ranged characters to avoid monster melee damage.
• The most dangerous ranged enemies tend to be casters using spells that can be avoided with Reflex saving throws, which makes Evasion the best way to mitigate ranged damage.
What’s going on with monsters?
• Damage per hit from melee monsters is very high, even if you are building to mitigate it.
o It may be OK to hit this hard against robe-wearing arcane casters, but characters should be able to greatly reduce this damage with medium or heavy armor, appropriate feats, enhancements, destiny choices, and other itemization.
• Some other statistics may need looking at for Monsters, including hit points, saving throws, and the DCs of monster abilities.

On Balance Changes
There’s a wide variety of general opinions, including everything from “buff everything”, “nerf everything”, to “balance nothing”, “have a vision at Turbine and do the right thing!”, each of these repeated by multiple people. The best course probably involves some elements of all of these comments, both buffing and nerfing, possibly including nerfing monsters.
Many players have urged caution with any changes, specifically to minimize collateral damage. As an example, if changes are made to nerf monkcher Furyshotters, don’t break monks, rangers, other Fury of the Wild characters, and all ranged characters at the same time. Favor the scalpel over the sledgehammer.

Some quotes:
• “Characters should have to make tradeoffs. At the moment this isn't happening; some classes are able to have top notch dps and defense.”
• “DDO's greatest differentiating strength is the depth and robustness of character creation and development. The current situation effectively renders that moot, leaving DDO without a competitive advantage.”
• “This is a fantasy game, I log on to feel awesome.”
• “I'd like to see balance change once, to something good enough that most players are satisfied with it, and then stay that way for the duration. That would be perfect. But, you know... many small corrections as the need arises might be good enough.”
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...yVsBalance.png


On Diversity
A few seemed concerned that balance meant making everything the same. That’s not the goal, and the diversity of different build options represents one of the greatest strengths of DDO. The major reason we would want to balance anything would be to make more builds feel viable and fun to play, even in the most difficult quests.
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...nalVsPower.png

On Synergy
Many players noted that “overpowered” builds combine amazing synergies that may or may not have been intended. There are occasional combinations that produce unanticipated results, but generally speaking we aim to provide some synergies in character building. It’s OK for certain combos to be more than the sum of their parts, as long as there are lots of different synergies that don’t end up too far apart from each other in terms of fun and viability.

Survival & Defense
We’re thinking about the possibility of making some changes to how armor and shields work, with the goal of making medium and heavy armor more viable forms of defense in epic content. These discussions are at the most preliminary stages, but we’re aware there are issues here.

Multiclassing (ignoring Enhancements)
This could be another entire discussion. But many players thought it was crazy that multiclassing wasn’t the forefront of the discussion, so let’s talk about it.

We like being D&D. We are unlikely to significantly alter or remove core feats or abilities from classes or races.

Evasion is probably the biggest single draw for taking 2 Rogue or Monk levels. However, we may think about how common Reflex saving throws are vs. other saving throws, and other no-save effects that feel fair for monsters and players both. This would be a long-reaching goal, and would need to be made in concert with other changes, such as making sure that players aren’t simply dying, if Evasion was the only thing keeping most characters alive.

Multiclassing and Enhancement Trees
The enhancement pass in Update 19 certainly affected multiclassing. As a matter of learning from history, here’s some reasons why, which we were mostly aware of at the time:
• Frontloading and Minimizing changes to characters: Many popular & powerful abilities are “front-loaded”; they are on low tiers in the enhancement trees. This was very consciously done so that most characters could still get most of what they desired without much hassle. We knew this would incentivize multiclassing, but decided that was an acceptable cost. Even with this, during the enhancement pass there was a great deal of outcry. This is something we could make incremental changes to affect, but each change would probably make some subset of players upset, and we’re in no hurry to revamp everything and move everything around. (Giant tangential discussion for another time or place: “Class” enhancement trees aren’t a simple solution to this.)
• Number of enhancement trees: A major part of the original design (intended to present choice as well as help balance multiclass builds vs. pure builds) was the limit of 3 enhancement trees. Yes, you could still make a Henshin Mystic + Thief Acrobat, but you’d have to make meaningful choices and give things up to get them. Multiclassing is still clearly an increase in power (you get the “best” 3 trees out of 6-9, instead of just 3), but not as much as it is with 6 class trees. Essentially, we changed this due to feedback at the time, knowing it would help lead to the rise of multiclass characters. This is one of those places where we had a vision but it simply wasn’t accepted by the community at-large (which is not to place the blame on anyone.) We try to strike a balance between design considerations and the desires of the people who play our game, so we changed this to 6 class trees.
• Class Level Requirements: The U18 Enhancements largely required 6/12/18 class levels to get “the good stuff”. Both internally amongst the design team and publicly amongst the players, during the Enhancement pass a great variety of class level restrictions were proposed for the 5-tier trees we have now. These included some very strong calls for 1/3/6/12/28 (similar to the old system), all the way down to not requiring any class levels at all (essentially just requiring access to the tree). I’ll take personal responsibility for fighting for the 1/2/3/4/5 system we have today, which was for the goal of meaningful choices along with interesting possible builds. Instead of nearly every build being 20 or 18/2 or maybe 12/6/2, there’s a much wider variety of builds that players consider and actually take. Along with the third Core enhancement requiring level 6, there’s at least some real reasons to want anywhere from 1-6 class levels at least. And there are definitely some builds that splash 2/3/4 levels for specific enhancements and synergies. While these synergies do provide extra power, they also provide a much wider array of possible choices while still being choices (compared to only requiring 1 level of a class to access the entire tree). There’s still some debate that perhaps 1/2/3/4/5 is too generous, but this isn’t something we’d change lightly.

Frequency and Speed of Changes
In the forums, many players agreed that if something was going to be changed, it should be changed right away. However, there were some interesting notes, such as: “sometimes it takes a long long time before the synergy of certain things gets ‘popular’ and then is perceived as ‘overpowered’. Many months sometimes. Just because people discover a synergy straight away doesn't mean it should automatically be nerfed.” Also, the survey responses suggested that we should try to avoid any kind of immediate kneejerk reactions.

https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/files/HowSoon.png

As a contemporary note: When something is nerfed for Divine Crusader on Lamannia, or between Lamannia and live launch of the patch, this is sometimes an example of this in action. With our efforts to try to get features in front of players on Lamannia sooner, you are likely to see more changes, including ‘nerfs’. (It’s difficult for designers to even think of changes as nerfs, for a feature that has never been live. Internally here at Turbine, a design may change many times before players even seen it, the power level going up and down all the time.)

What’s specific items do players consider overpowered?
Major caveat: Anything considered overpowered by some is also loved by others. We’re aware of this. Anything on this list is also NOT automatically going to be nerfed or changed in any particular way, but these are things we may take a closer look at. There’s quite a few other possibilities we might look at, but these were near the top of the list for discussions.
• Ranged Fury of the Wild
• Monks using 10K Stars and manyshot (monkchers)
• Bladeforged Reconstruct

Survey
We always appreciate the passionate and detailed feedback you guys provide us, both as forum posts and as survey results. We’re still trying to improve how we construct surveys in the future, including adding N/A options. It was not our intent to only include information from players who were extremely knowledgeable with all classes and epic destines; we could have pointed out that it was fine to leave some answers blank (which many people did).

Here’s an overview of some of the survey results. Reminder that higher values indicate more power.
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...erAverages.png
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...erAverages.png
https://www.ddo.com/sites/default/fi...erAverages.png


Thanks for the great feedback! We’ll be reading along and looking for your ideas and opinions.

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Interesting read and great charts!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vargouille

What’s specific items do players consider overpowered?
Major caveat: Anything considered overpowered by some is also loved by others. We’re aware of this. Anything on this list is also NOT automatically going to be nerfed or changed in any particular way, but these are things we may take a closer look at. There’s quite a few other possibilities we might look at, but these were near the top of the list for discussions.
• Ranged Fury of the Wild
• Monks using 10K Stars and manyshot (monkchers)
• Bladeforged Reconstruct

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Nerfs incoming.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rest

Nerfs incoming.

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Shiradi Shuricannons incoming.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alfhild

Shiradi Shuricannons incoming.

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Incoming? They're already here.

I guess the silver lining is that no matter what they nerf, someone will figure out something else awesome which will then in turn become nerfed.
It'd be nice if, just once, they increased power to abilities to bring them up to the level of so-called "overpowered" abilities instead of nerfing the good ones.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vargouille

Thanks for the great feedback! We’ll be reading along and looking for your ideas and opinions.

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Thank you for posting this excellent writeup.

Predictably enough, there's not a lot to be gleaned from the graphs and numeric survey results. But your summary of overwhelming player opinion from this thread and the survey comments seems pretty accurate to me, and it's nice to see that you're taking a nuanced and cautious approach to the whole thing.

No doubt I'll be back to arguing vehemently once it comes time for you guys to actually make changes, but for now I'm really impressed and pleased with the communication and the effort you're putting into this.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vargouille

What’s specific items do players consider overpowered?
Major caveat: Anything considered overpowered by some is also loved by others. We’re aware of this. Anything on this list is also NOT automatically going to be nerfed or changed in any particular way, but these are things we may take a closer look at. There’s quite a few other possibilities we might look at, but these were near the top of the list for discussions.
• Ranged Fury of the Wild
• Monks using 10K Stars and manyshot (monkchers)
• Bladeforged Reconstruct

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I agree that these are the worst offenders. I know a lot of people would add Shiradi casters to the list, but I think they're going off old information or have simply never tried one themselves. I'm surprised to see an expensive iconic class like Bladeforged on the list -- I can't imagine this will ever actually be nerfed, given how many people payed real money for this precise ability, but it's definitely one of the more unbalanced elements in the current game. I would potentially add Master's Blitz -- not because I think it's overpowered compared to non-melee, but just because it's so much more useful than any other melee destiny ability that it may become overpowered if you make changes to allow melee in general to be more viable.

My one qualm is that it would have been nice to have a similar section for specific items players players think are underpowered that you're also going to take a closer look at. You definitely touched on that with the discussion of medium/heavy armor and the lack of ways for melees to mitigate danger. But it would be nice to see a breakdown like this of what you see as the areas to focus on potentially buffing. (My personal list would be barbarians and paladins throughout the game, bards throughout the game (but less so than barbarians/paladins), artificers in epics, and any non-evasion melees in high level heroics through epics.)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rest

Incoming? They're already here.

I guess the silver lining is that no matter what they nerf, someone will figure out something else awesome which will then in turn become nerfed.
It'd be nice if, just once, they increased power to abilities to bring them up to the level of so-called "overpowered" abilities instead of nerfing the good ones.

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Something will always be the best.

The goal should be for at least the top 10-20 builds to be a few % behind the best one, at most.

5% behind the best is viable. 25% behind the best is marginal. 60% behind the best is unplayable in any content designed for the better builds.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rest

Nerfs incoming.

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yep


Funny thing is endgame rangers are getting nerfed almost as much as monkchers judging from the FotW ranged comment.

That's fine I'll just blitz .... until I get to a supposedly fixed portal and it strips them away.

why is BF reconstruct even on the radar? the lack of good reconstruct in this game and ways to boost your character to repair themselves like heal amp, outside of casters, has always boggled my mind. there is too much focus on positive healing when there are warforged in the game too that need reliable repairing, especially in this BYOH era of DDO. i don't think a BF Paladin or BF Ranger for example should have equivalent repairing to Cleric/FVS heal spells, but it should be equivalent to what a fleshy can do boosting positive healing with cure spells or a little more since BF have Power of the Forge. that's the only real issue i have with Vargs update. everything else seems to acknowledge the problems.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sirgog

Something will always be the best.

The goal should be for at least the top 10-20 builds to be a few % behind the best one, at most.

5% behind the best is viable. 25% behind the best is marginal. 60% behind the best is unplayable in any content designed for the better builds.

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Yeah but with 2 berjillion build possibilities in DDO (ie not 20k).... there will always be those that are way behind in power.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vargouille

Multiclassing and Enhancement Trees
The enhancement pass in Update 19 certainly affected multiclassing. As a matter of learning from history, here’s some reasons why, which we were mostly aware of at the time:
• Frontloading and Minimizing changes to characters: Many popular & powerful abilities are “front-loaded”; they are on low tiers in the enhancement trees. This was very consciously done so that most characters could still get most of what they desired without much hassle. We knew this would incentivize multiclassing, but decided that was an acceptable cost. Even with this, during the enhancement pass there was a great deal of outcry. This is something we could make incremental changes to affect, but each change would probably make some subset of players upset, and we’re in no hurry to revamp everything and move everything around. (Giant tangential discussion for another time or place: “Class” enhancement trees aren’t a simple solution to this.)
• Number of enhancement trees: A major part of the original design (intended to present choice as well as help balance multiclass builds vs. pure builds) was the limit of 3 enhancement trees. Yes, you could still make a Henshin Mystic + Thief Acrobat, but you’d have to make meaningful choices and give things up to get them. Multiclassing is still clearly an increase in power (you get the “best” 3 trees out of 6-9, instead of just 3), but not as much as it is with 6 class trees. Essentially, we changed this due to feedback at the time, knowing it would help lead to the rise of multiclass characters. This is one of those places where we had a vision but it simply wasn’t accepted by the community at-large (which is not to place the blame on anyone.) We try to strike a balance between design considerations and the desires of the people who play our game, so we changed this to 6 class trees.
• Class Level Requirements: The U18 Enhancements largely required 6/12/18 class levels to get “the good stuff”. Both internally amongst the design team and publicly amongst the players, during the Enhancement pass a great variety of class level restrictions were proposed for the 5-tier trees we have now. These included some very strong calls for 1/3/6/12/28 (similar to the old system), all the way down to not requiring any class levels at all (essentially just requiring access to the tree). I’ll take personal responsibility for fighting for the 1/2/3/4/5 system we have today, which was for the goal of meaningful choices along with interesting possible builds. Instead of nearly every build being 20 or 18/2 or maybe 12/6/2, there’s a much wider variety of builds that players consider and actually take. Along with the third Core enhancement requiring level 6, there’s at least some real reasons to want anywhere from 1-6 class levels at least. And there are definitely some builds that splash 2/3/4 levels for specific enhancements and synergies. While these synergies do provide extra power, they also provide a much wider array of possible choices while still being choices (compared to only requiring 1 level of a class to access the entire tree). There’s still some debate that perhaps 1/2/3/4/5 is too generous, but this isn’t something we’d change lightly.

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Rather than focusing on nerfing multi-classing, you should consider boosting the capstone. Perhaps giving every class a free feat @ level 20 of that class. Additionally, the capstone enhancement available only if you have level 20 of that class should be as good as splashing in a few levels of others classes
- 2 levels of monk gives 2 feats + evasion
- 2 levels of paladin gives you amazing saves
- 2-4 levels of favored soul gives you sp + great crits
- etc., etc., etc.

The benefit of 20 levels of a single class should be equal to the benefit of splashing in other classes - currently that is not the case.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by slarden

Rather than focusing on nerfing multi-classing, you should consider boosting the capstone. Perhaps giving every class a free feat @ level 20 of that class. Additionally, the capstone enhancement available only if you have level 20 of that class should be as good as splashing in a few levels of others classes
- 2 levels of monk gives 2 feats + evasion
- 2 levels of paladin gives you amazing saves
- 2-4 levels of favored soul gives you sp + great crits
- etc., etc., etc.

The benefit of 20 levels of a single class should be equal to the benefit of splashing in other classes - currently that is not the case.

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No one is "focusing on nerfing multi-classing". :) If you got that impression from the writeup, perhaps we were not clear enough.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vargouille

We’ve read the forum posts and tallied the surveys,

snip

Thanks for the great feedback! We’ll be reading along and looking for your ideas and opinions.

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Thank you so much for letting us know what you guys are thinking.


Also, I am very impressed by your interpretation, and I think almost all of what you said is dead on!


One word of caution (or two).

While I am not a Fury fan, it "should" be a very useful destiny for Rangers. So don't nerf it too much.


Also with Blade Forge Reconstruct. Again... I am not a BF fan... but... don't totally kill their Reconstruct ability.
Others may have better ideas about this than me, but I was thinking simply a meaningful cool down would appropriate.
..with the goal of using it once per fight/room/area of dungeon maybe.....

When a problem comes along
You must nerf it
Before the cream sets out too long
You must nerf it
When something's goin' wrong
You must nerf it

Now nerf it
Into shape
Shape it up
Get straight
Go forward
Move ahead
Try to detect it
It's not too late
To nerf it
Nerf it good

When a good time turns around
You must nerf it
You will never live it down
Unless you nerf it
No one gets away
Until they nerf it

I say nerf it
nerf it good
I say nerf it
Nerf it good

Crack that nerf
Give the past a slip
Step on a crack
Break your momma's back

When a problem comes along
You must nerf it
Before the cream sets out too long
You must nerf it
When something's goin' wrong
You must nerf it

Now nerf it
Into shape
Shape it up
Get straight
Go forward
Move ahead
Try to detect it
It's not too late
To nerf it
Into shape
Shape it up
Get straight
Go forward
Move ahead
Try to detect it
It's not too late
To nerf it
Well, nerf it good

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Qhualor

why is BF reconstruct even on the radar? the lack of good reconstruct in this game and ways to boost your character to repair themselves like heal amp, outside of casters, has always boggled my mind. there is too much focus on positive healing when there are warforged in the game too that need reliable repairing, especially in this BYOH era of DDO. i don't think a BF Paladin or BF Ranger for example should have equivalent repairing to Cleric/FVS heal spells, but it should be equivalent to what a fleshy can do boosting positive healing with cure spells or a little more since BF have Power of the Forge. that's the only real issue i have with Vargs update. everything else seems to acknowledge the problems.

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Well, I haven't used it much; but when I played around with it it looked like it cost next to nothing SP wise (so has almost limitless uses) and had a cooldown so short that it seemed you could just spam Reconstruct endlessly IMO.


Correct me if I am wrong.
I rolled one up to experiment with, but didn't really play him.